Ambitious recycling levels set by the EU is driving innovation
PRIMARY DEMAND
Cutting the levels of virgin metal used in EV batteries could help reduce dirty mining activities
RECYCLING RESEARCH
To maximise the level of reusable material extracted from retired batteries academic institutions and new start-ups are researching new processes
KEY QUOTE
Start-ups need further research work before their claimed lithium recycling rates can be materialised. This needs additional investments
Vehicles fuelled by fossil fuels are reaching the end of the road across Europe. Governments are increasingly adopting phase-out dates for petrol and diesel cars, while automakers are responding by announcing production end dates for such models. But the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) requires a huge amount of raw materials. The European Commission estimates a 14-fold increase in global demand for batteries by 2030 (compared with 2018 levels), mostly driven by electric transport. By 2030, the EU alone will need 18 times more lithium and five times more cobalt, key elements of batteries. This rises to almost 60 times more lithium and 15 times more cobalt by 2050, it believes. The danger is that demand for dirty fossil fuels will be replaced with demand for dirty mining. Cobalt extraction has been associated with hazardous conditions for workers and pollution, while lithium mining has come under scrutiny for its water intensity in particularly arid regions. Various strategies could help minimise the need for new mining for minerals needed for EVs, including improving battery design to extend lifetime, disincentivising private car ownership and reusing EV batteries in other sectors such as energy storage to extend their lifetimes. But battery recycling is a key element of reducing demand for virgin material. The Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) found that optimising battery metal recovery could cut primary demand compared to total demand in 2040 by around 25% for lithium, 35% for cobalt and nickel, and 55% for copper. Worldwide, the capacity for battery recycling is around 180 kilotonnes per year (kt/yr), according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). However, almost half of this is within China, which is planning to expand capacity significantly by 1,000 kt/y.
EU CAPACITY In the EU, the battery recycling industry is nascent, dominated by batteries in waste electronic products such as mobile phones and laptops. However, the IEA predicts significant growth in the next few years as sales of EVs and energy storage systems ramp up to the end of the decade. By 2030, the IEA expects volumes of batteries reaching the end of their first life to rise from less than two gigawatt-hours (GWh) today to 100 GWh by 2030, and 600-1,300 GWh by 2040. These will come mostly from electric cars, while 10% will be from two and three-wheelers, more than 5% from buses and trucks and just over 1% from energy storage. In the intervening years, recyclers can scale operations up by recycling scrap material produced by manufacturers.
RECYCLING TARGETS Scaling up the recycling of lithium-ion batteries to sufficient levels faces various technological and commercial challenges. Commercial viability of recycling depends on the costs of collecting and disassembling the batteries, as well as the value of the batteries recycled. According to the IEA, barriers include a lack of comprehensive systems for material collection at a national level in most countries; a regulatory gap in discharging, disassembling and storing spent batteries; and fire risk from lithium-ion batteries posing problems for transport logistics. In addition, the wide variety of cell types and chemistries on the market make automation of recycling processes challenging. However, a new Batteries Regulation published by the European Commission in December 2020 aims to solve this. The draft places a particular emphasis on the recycling of EV batteries, including mandatory minimum levels of recycled content for cobalt, nickel, lead and lithium for 2030 and 2035 and additional targets to collect 65% of batteries for recycling by the end of 2025, rising to 70% by the end of 2030; including specific material recovery targets of 95% for cobalt, copper, lead and nickel, and 70% for lithium by 2030.
LITHIUM LIMITS Though broadly welcomed by environmental campaigners and industry, one area of contention is the target for the recovery of lithium. Current recycling processes cannot recover lithium at a quality suitable for manufacturing cathodes for new batteries, so it is either recovered for reuse in other industries or lost in the process. Newer processes are available to tackle lithium-ion in batteries and many others are in development. The UTS study noted that it was technologically possible to recover all four metals at rates above 90%, but current recovery is limited by weak economics and a lack of policy to encourage the use of recycled materials. Transport and Environment (T&E), a European green transport campaign group, wants the Commission’s proposed 70% recovery target for lithium to be brought forward to 2025. Alex Keynes, from T&E, believes the industry has plenty of time to scale up processes for lithium recovery and to invest in infrastructure.
However, some are sceptical that such high levels of lithium recovery are possible. “Start-ups need further research work before their claimed lithium recycling rates can be materialised. This needs additional investments. A legislative framework should not be based on small-scale demonstration plants, it should be based on what is available on an industrial scale. There are many very good initiatives that never reach industrial maturity,” warns Jan Tytgat of Umicore, a raw material refiner and battery recycler. Meanwhile, newcomers to the sector are optimistic. Ajay Kochhar of Li-Cycle, a Canadian recycling firm founded in 2016, admits that recovering lithium for use elsewhere has been a challenge. The company’s process isolates the battery’s cathode, which contains most of the lithium, and then uses hydrometallurgical processing—a metal recovery method using an aqueous media—to recover battery-grade lithium carbonate. “We can get to over 90% recovery rates for lithium, if not higher. We’ve demonstrated this across many types of lithium batteries at appreciable scale,” Kochhar says. The company has existing facilities in Ontario and New York, where it is building a second, much larger plant. This will produce 3,000-5,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year when it becomes operational, around the same amount as some of China’s smaller existing producers. Sweden’s Northvolt, a battery manufacturer, is also optimistic about lithium recycling. It saw a huge gap in Europe’s EV battery manufacturing capacity and plans to obtain 50% of materials for its batteries from its own recycling facilities by 2030. It is targeting the production of 150 gigawatt-hours of battery manufacturing by that date. “We recycle pretty high concentrations of lithium. Right now, we can probably promise [over] 80%, but it will be higher going forward,” says Emma Nehrenheim, Northvolt’s chief environmental officer. The key is not to lose lithium in the pre-processing stage, which can be caused by several factors, such as very high temperatures during thermal treatment, she says. NEW APPROACH Emerging research is showing promise in making recycling of lithium-ion batteries more efficient and less energy and chemical-intensive. In July 2021, experts at UK battery research organisation the Faraday Institution published a new method they claim is 100 times quicker, greener and leads to higher purity of recovered materials relative to current separation methods. The team, part of the institution’s “ReLib” project looking into a range of aspects of EV battery recycling, used ultrasonic delamination to blast the active materials in batteries—graphite and lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides—from the electrodes, leaving virgin aluminium or copper behind. By using water or dilute acids as the solvent, the technique is more environmentally friendly and less expensive to operate, the company adds. Andrew Abbott at the University of Leicester who led the research says the technique could be used initially on scrap from battery manufacturing facilities, which constitutes 5-20% of material produced. Recycled materials could then be fed straight back into the production line at the same site. The team is talking to battery manufacturers and recycling companies to install a technology demonstrator at an industrial site during 2021. More material can be recovered from EV batteries and in a purer state, if they are disassembled rather than shredded, which is the main technique used today, Abbott says. However, for disassembly to be a possibility, batteries, cells, modules and packs must be designed for recycling. This is already the case in the parts of Asia, where 100,000 tonnes of EVs are disassembled a year. However, the majority of battery manufacturers glue components together for increased stability, which makes them unsuitable for disassembly, Abbott adds. Northvolt says it is looking into easing the disassembly of batteries through cell and battery design to make extracting the metals easier. Separately, researchers at Coventry University developed a method of recovering all metals used in EV batteries using bacteria. The process, known as bioleaching, is widely used in the mining industry to separate valuable metals from ores. It uses microbes to oxidise metals as part of its metabolism. The resulting purified metals can be recycled indefinitely back into multiple supply chains, according to the researchers. 
LONG HORIZONS Whatever technologies and processes become mainstream, those in the sector are confident they can be developed in time for when the main supply of EV batteries starts to flow through the system in around ten years. “The next decade is split into three phases. Today, we can get a small portion of cobalt and nickel coming from recycled material, but the amount of lithium recovered through recycling is close to zero,” says Kochhar. “Over the next ten years, recycling could supply 5-20% of the raw material demand for the lithium-ion battery market. Then over the next 20-40 years, we will definitely see the ability for recycled content to account for 50-70% of the total demand—that’s certainly where things are going,” he adds. “It’s almost like we’re getting our reps up on the first wave of material before the tsunami of used batteries comes in the next ten years,” he adds. Northvolt’s Nehrenheim believes that a recycling market will be mainstream within the EU by the time bigger volumes of used EV batteries start hitting the market. “I think it’ll be very natural for anyone to know exactly where to put the battery at the end of life and that recycling rates of batteries will be a key offering to customers, just like when you buy a fridge now.”•
TEXT Catherine Early